When King Henry VI of England founded Eton College in 1440 as “The King’s College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor”, he could scarcely have imagined that 578 years later it would be attended by students from all over the world, and least of all that they would not even need to leave their home countries to study there. But modern witchcraft (the internet) has made it so in the form of Eton’s online teaching arm, EtonX.
Computers are dumb. They do what they are told to do, and that’s it. Powerful as they are, computers cannot (yet) make decisions on anything like a human level. If a nasty piece of code gets injected into a computer, it will execute it - unless other software tells it not to. The computer doesn’t ‘know’ that the code is undesirable.
Over 50 leading AI and robotics researchers have said they will boycott a leading Korean research institute over its plans to develop AI-powered weapons.
In February, KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) announced that it was launching a joint research project with defense company Hanwha Systems to develop AI technologies for lethal autonomous weapons that search for and eliminate targets without human control.
In the wake of the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which saw 50 million Facebook users’ data skimmed off by an unscrupulous British firm and used to help politicians target voters in Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, many users of the social network have woken up to the fact that their previously blasé attitudes towards what Facebook does with their data may need revising.
Online university EdX was started in 2012 by Harvard and MIT. It’s a not-for-profit MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) platform providing free online courses to advance careers and improve lives. It is now a leading provider of stripped-down, no-fluff, laser-focused postgraduate qualifications from top universities designed with today’s job market in mind. And employers love it because it provides them with candidates with up-to-date, relevant, job-specific skills.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
The World Health Organization recently added workplace burnout to its International Classification of Diseases as an occupational phenomenon. It isn’t classed as a disease but a ‘factor influencing health status’.
It is no surprise that if the place where you spend most of your waking life is getting you down, then you are not going to be the happiest bunny on the block and eventually something will have to give. The WHO define burnout as follows:
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
A new video lecture course has emerged which brings a fresh angle on the ancient and classical worlds, delivered by a lecturer whose enthusiasm for her subject shines through and brings ‘dead’ history to life. If you are looking for a deep dive into the civilizations which preceded the Middle Ages – how they lived, what they believed, how they rose and fell, what they left behind and their influence on successive civilizations right up to the present day – then this video lecture series is for you.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
